Michel Foucault — "The function of the intellectual is to question the obvious."
The function of the intellectual is to question the obvious.
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More from Michel Foucault
"My role—and that is all I claim—is to show that things are not as self-evident as one might believe."
"The problem is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are."
"The history of sexuality is not the history of sexual practices, but the history of the discourse on sexuality."
"Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere."
"There are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised."
About Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
French philosopher and historian whose Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality reframed power, knowledge, and institutions in modern thought. Closely associated with Jacques Derrida (deconstruction peer) and Gilles Deleuze (philosophical ally on power and difference). For an intellectual contrast, see Jürgen Habermas, German social theorist of communicative rationality — Habermas insisted on universal norms of reason — exactly the position Foucault's 'power/knowledge' framework treats as itself a power effect. The Foucault-Habermas debate is the canonical postwar argument over whether reason is universal-emancipatory or always-already complicit with power.
The standard scholarly entry points to Michel Foucault's work: Didier Eribon (French intellectual biographer) — Michel Foucault (1989); Stuart Elden (Warwick, political geographer) — Foucault's Last Decade (2016); Gary Gutting (Notre Dame, philosophy) — Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (2005). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Michel Foucault.